I've written about Brazil pre-Lula and post-Lula and spent the last five years covering all aspects of the country for Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Barron's. Meanwhile, for an undetermined amount of time, and with a little help from my friends, I will be parachuting primarily into Brazil, Russia, India and China. But will also be on the look out for interesting business stories and investing ideas throughout the emerging markets.

It's A Ron Paul Nightmare: A World Run By Central Bankers

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - OCTOBER 18: A protester holds a placard in front of the headquarters of the European Central Bank (EZB) on October 18, 2011 in Frankfurt. Around one hundred protesters operated a camp outside the Bank to demonstrate against economic and financial policies. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Since 2008, the chairman of a nation’s Central Bank has been more important to domestic economic policy than congress or the nation’s president. Congress has basically been replaced by the Treasury. The White House has been replaced by the Fed.

Investors are making more of a note of this lately. Elected officials…are disappointing, to put it gently. “If investors could short congress, that would be the biggest play in the market,” Paul Dietrich, CEO of Foxhall Capital Management in Orange, Conn. told me.

Following last year’s meetings between Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, both have nearly begged Congress and President Obama to lead so they wouldn’t have to provide liquidity to jump start the economy.

The presidential campaign trail is like a repeat of the early 1990s, where upstart Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush when he successfully convinced Americans “it’s the economy, stupid.” And while Ron Paul has failed to convince the general public that “it’s monetary policy, stupid”, the Texas Congressman said during the primaries in New Hampshire that, “never before has monetary policy been such a central theme on the campaign trail and so important to the nation.”

That’s not only true in the U.S., it is also true in China, India, Brazil and all of eurozone, where the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are busy coordinating an international effort with Finance Ministers globally to help protect southern Europe from bankruptcy. People in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain are losing their incomes. The politicians are at whit’s end. Central Bankers are in charge, keeping the economy on life support where politicians have been unable to do so on their own.

This might very well be the worst nightmare of at least one presidential candidate. The Fed hating Ron Paul has warned against Central Bankers running the economy. Have we finally reached the point where bankers really do rule the world?

Earlier this month, at the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, Mohammed El-Erian of PIMCO said as guest lecturer, “Let me say right here that the analysis will suggest that central banks can no longer – indeed, should no longer – carry the bulk of the policy burden. This is not a question of willingness or ability. Rather, it is a recognition of the declining effectiveness of central banks’ tools in countering deleveraging forces amid impediments to growth that dominate the outlook. It is also about the growing risk of collateral damage and unintended circumstances.”

But whether it is in Washington or Mumbai, Central Bankers are indeed running the show. To them, and to most of us, the elected officials have failed.

Last week, when Indian Central Bank president Duvvuri Subbarao reduced interest rates by a surprisingly high 50 basis points to help the economy, some market pundits warned that this was the last help the government could expect from Subbarao until Indian politicians put the country’s fiscal house in order. Subbarao has more power than the country’s president, Prathiba Patil, and probably more than her chief advisor and Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.

At this point, the president is ceremonial. He attends parties. He dances. He sings. He kisses babies. He has hot ex-actress or model mistresses until they figure out how impotent their man really is. The real power — the real guys making the economy run in crisis mode — are the Finance Ministers, Treasury Secretaries and Central Bankers. Congress, globally, and especially in the West, are largely missing in action, more interested in the next election, or devising clever new sound bytes for the 24 hour cable news shows, the agreeing on long-term solutions to the debt crisis and growing inequality. It’s not a Central Banker’s job to care about the public good. They are not elected to care about social security and healthcare reforms.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testifies before the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC two months after the debt ceiling was raised. Bernanke and his colleague Tim Geithner have all but begged for Congress and the President to take control of the economy. For now, the weight of the U.S. economy is on their shoulders.

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First it is not a liquidity issue that we have, It is a debit issue. All the money begins with debit and the debit hole keeps getting bigger it is in an Hockey stick climb as we fight to push Growth over the top of the Debit increasing as more money is created. The simple answer is to remove the debit from monetary creation, More complex is to adjust the rate of debit creation to below Growth levels

Are you really trying to justify debt as a good thing? America’s debt has gone bigger in the past 10 years than it ever has in history. How about we make some cuts in the federal government? such an obvious thing is barely needs debating.

It’s not so much that Americans are incompetent, but more that the MSM is in the pocket of big business. There’s no way that America’s corporatocracy is ever going to willingly elect someone like Ron Paul into the most influential position in the country. The people will believe whatever the MSM tells them because, without the internet, they don’t have access to different opinions.

Luckily, it’s not up to them if enough of us get involved. I’m sincerely rooting for RP, and am really hoping this delegate strategy of his pays off. We, as a country, need him.

Look, here’s where you are right…and here is where I think you are wrong, Albert. First, Ron Paul has never polled over 20% on a national level. The MSM are going to cover people who get attention, because that means they get what they want most: eyeballs attached to their news shows, or reading their newspapers. I’ve written plenty times about Ron Paul here and have always gotten a lot of readers; way more than articles I have done on Romney or Gingrich. So I think you are right, that Ron Paul is interesting — somewhat — but that the powers that be probably don’t want him in power. Keep in mind, the powers that be didn’t want Obama in power at first either. Unless you live in a dictatorship, it is VERY hard to fully control the will of the people. Which brings me to where you are wrong…people do have the internet at home. Most Americans are plugged in. But they dont use the internet for news, per se. So even with the internet, Ron Paul is still not gaining in popularity. Most people want to read about Apple and Justin Beiber and video games on line; not End the Fed.

If we really wanted stability we could scrap fractional reserve banking that would end the cycle of infinite leveraging but that’s not going to happen Central bankers are addicted to easy money and easy money is “Good” business for a relative short term. Long term growth has all ways been with 100% reserve only loan out money that they can cover the loss on. Who was it the Danish bankers? Made there dinky little country into a world power that way just think what America could do!

Ron Paul can “end the Fed” indirectly by introducing competing currencies and legalizing Gold and Silver as legal tender. People will simply stop using the devaluing Dollar currency and it would cease to exist.